I wasn't just wrong, I was being an idiot. "When Google was in the thick of Android's development in 2006 and 2007 - long before the platform ever reached retail - it was a very different product, almost unrecognizable compared to the products we used today. Documents dated May of 2007 and made public during the course of Oracle's lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android show off a number of those preliminary user interface elements, prominently marked 'subject to change', and you can see how this used to be a product focused on portrait QWERTY devices." I'm hoping I can dive into this a little deeper tomorrow; since it's the busiest period of the year for my little company right now, I don't have the time to do it today. Just to make sure nobody thinks I'm just going to ignore this, I figured it'd be a good idea to post a quickie today. I'll get back to this tomorrow, or Friday at the latest.

Do you really think those screen shots look so different to the Android of today? All I see is an interface suitable for a low resolution 2" square screen. Obviously if they were targetting at a small screen above a qwerty keyboard, things would look a little different, but the big difference between those screenshots and the current Android is a bit of whitespace to spread the blocks of text out. The only other difference is that today we have icons on the home screen of our phones. <sarcasm>Clearly apple invented icons, we all know that </sarcasm>

EDIT: Actually, if these screenshots prove anything, it's that Apple stole the "skeumorphism" you love so much, Thom. Look at that calculator! And expressing the time as the rotation of the planet!